Deficits and debt in industrialized democracies

1. Introduction / Gene Park and Eisaku Ide -- 2. The difficulty of fiscal consolidation in France / Anna Konishi and Frederic Tristram -- 3. Fiscal performance in Germany : the role of electoral competition / Achim Kemmerling and Zbigniew Truchlewski -- 4. Fiscal performance in Italy : a historical institutionalist approach / Benedicta Marzinotto -- 5. Explaining Japan's fiscal performance : why has it become an Outlier? / Masayuki Takahashi and Takaharu Shimada -- 6. Fiscal performance in South Korea (1970-2012) : budgetary reforms with growing non-budgetary indiscipline / Myung-Koo Kang -- 7. Fiscal performance in Sweden / Jonas Edlund and Morinao Iju -- 8. Long-run fiscal consolidations in the United States : the history at the federal level / W. Elliot Brownlee -- 9. Politics, fiscal performance, and external sources of budget discipline in the United States, 1970-2013 -- 10. Weaving the basket : elusive fiscal convergence in the European Union / Edward A. Fogarty -- 11. Conclusion / Eisaku Ide and Gene Park.

Since the global financial crisis, government debt has soared globally by 40 percent and now exceeds an astonishing 100 trillion. Not all countries, though, have fared the same. Indeed, even prior to the financial crisis, the fiscal fates of countries have been diverging, despite predictions that pressures from economic globalization push countries toward more convergent fiscally conservative policies. Featuring the work of an international interdisciplinary team of scholars, this volume explains patterns of fiscal performance (persistent patterns of budget deficits and government debt) from t